bitflipper

If there was any doubt that video game music has entered the mainstream, YouTube is full of examples of serious treatments in front of live audiences. Here's a nice example (the music starts after the interview part, which you'll want to skip if you don't speak Swedish). And my favorite rendition of the Skyrim theme... And if you're a fan of Fallout 4 you'll recognize this one right away..;

I've got one of those. Recognized it immediately, after her first "yep". It's a fun toy. Got MIDI input so what you're playing on a keyboard determines the synthesized notes. Also fx such as reverb, delay, chorus. And a looper, as heard in the video. I even use it (um, used to use, pre-pandemic) in the band for background oohs and aahs. The grandkids like the "Arnold" preset (e.g. "I'll be back").

This is why, when given the option, I always choose the VST2 version.

I also see that Boz's Manic Compressor is on sale for $29. Even if you're not into ultra compression, everybody needs at least one super-squasher on hand. Manic Compressor excels at beating any track into submission.

Boz took a lot of flak for initially pricing this at $300. He honestly thought it was that good. So did I. But there just wasn't a market for a $300 delay plugin, and it floundered. Even when the price came down to $150, the demand was not huge. Not when you can get goodies such as the wonderful tritik delay for 50 EUR. So I am delighted that it can now be had for 25 bucks. Now everyone can enjoy this top-tier effect. It's my absolute favorite for vocals because you can get that lush thickening that doesn't draw attention to itself, doesn't slur consonants or otherwise muddy the vocal.

I put off Omnisphere for a long time due to the scary pricetag and lack of a demo version to assure me that it would be worth the investment. In the end, I had to accept the word of people I trusted (mostly on this forum), cross my fingers and take the plunge. Much to my relief, it turned out to be money well spent. Omnisphere finds its way into almost every project, as it fills a hole that Kontakt libraries don't. For me, Omnisphere has become essential. That said, it isn't for everyone. If you mainly use traditional "bread 'n butter" sounds in your music, e.g. pianos, strings, percussion, these aren't what Omnisphere excels at. Oh, they're all in there. But if you're primarily a piano player there are better pianos out there. If you use sampled guitars, there are better (and far cheaper) solutions for that, too. If you do classic orchestration, ditto. Omnisphere doesn't replace those, it augments them. In a spectacularly lush way.

Yes, do a deep scan. It'll take awhile, so just kick it off at bedtime and check the results in the morning.

Makes sense to pick one platform and learn it well. For me, it was the other way around; I elected to dive into Kontakt instead. Mainly because I wanted to create Kontakt instruments from some of my favorite ROMpler patches. For that kind of thing, Kontakt is quick and easy. There was a period, though, when I was determined to become equally conversant with Omnisphere. It just didn't take, sorry to say. Made a few patches but none of them were significantly better than what I could have achieved more easily with a simpler synth. Nowadays, I limit myself to modifying other peoples' patches. Which is why I'm appreciative of folks such as yourself who have taken the time to make new content for Omnisphere. I am astonished that SampleTank is being mentioned in the same thread as if it were somehow comparable to either of these. Yes, I have SampleTank and have had it for years, going back to version 1. Yes, ST4 is easy to use and cheaper than either Kontakt or Omnisphere. But then you could say the same about the TTS-1.

Thanks for bumping the thread, Bob. I, too, had lost track of it. I'm guessing your issue isn't caused directly by excessive DPC latency, although that doesn't mean LatencyMon can't provide useful clues. That 28 milliseconds incurred by ATAPort.sys (your hard drive driver) warrants further investigation. Of course, it's not unusual for your drive to be working hard during a DAW session. But if it's got a bad or soft spot in the middle of an audio file, you could get noticeable glitching as the drive repeatedly attempts to re-read the sector. It wouldn't hurt to run a deep drive test (e.g. Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Diagnostics).

Thank you for solving a 50-year mystery, John. Maybe you have a theory on just what they put in the acid I took that night? A vending machine at the Strassenbahnhaltestelle (hope I remembered how to spell that correctly) warned me that I might be a character in someone else's thought experiment. At least, I think that's what it said. I can't be sure because on a normal day my German fluency was adequate for a conversation with a 5-year-old. (Yes, of course the vending machine spoke auf Deutsch. Duh.)

Saw Zappa in 1970, in Munich. Great show, featuring Flo & Eddie. Frank said very little during the performance, but at one point did note that the next song was in the key of "fish minor". I've been searching for that key ever since.

Also, you might want to consider a Kontakt version for the wider audience it would bring. Even if you're using Omnisphere-specific features that Kontakt can't duplicate exactly, that might just mean a slightly dumbed-down version with modulations baked in. Spectrasonics does indeed see Omnisphere as a synth, which makes sense given the company's origins. But most users see it as a ROMpler. Most Kontakt users have at least dabbled in making their own libraries for it, as evidenced by the plethora of free/cheap libraries out there. Non-commercial user-made Omnisphere libs don't seem like much of a thing beyond the efforts of a few brave souls such as yourself (thank you!). It certainly wouldn't be my first choice.

Great library! At least, based on the sample above. I've downloaded it and am looking forward to auditioning all 283 patches Be sure to bump this thread come Halloween.

BFD sounds better? That's a reasonable personal opinion, and you're not alone in that. I love the BFD sound. But more realistic? Nope. That's SD's main problem, really - too realistic. Anyone who has recorded real drums knows it's a lot of work getting a specific type of sound from them. BFD does much of that work for you, and I'm not knocking that. However, there is a necessary compromise, namely that BFD and similar products can't offer the flexibility of Superior's bare-metal approach. If a person can only afford one premium drum synth, SD is a good candidate because it can do it all. That includes SD2, which I used for its lifetime and loved it. Never bought any extra kits, either. Just the default kit that came with it. That's how flexible it is. Honestly, I only bought SD3 for the brushes and mallets.

Great review, Simeon. I remember vividly the first time I heard Ivory and being blown away by it. The demonstrator must have gotten a sore face from grinning all day, handing headphones to one convention-goer after another and watching them react. I stood there for awhile just watching peoples' faces light up. It was a universal reaction. Nowadays, we have a LOT of sampled pianos in that league to choose from but Ivory is still at or near the top of that category. It's so good that I can't imagine what version 3 might add - play itself, maybe? Gotta add, though, that despite having maybe 40 piano libraries in my collection, I have finally come around to believe that the future of piano VIs is not conventional sample libraries, but rather physical modeling. I was a skeptic for a long time, and for good reason. But today we are this close to modeled pianos that are indistinguishable from a high-end sample library - but only take up a few hundred megabytes, load in an eye blink and have 5-10x the velocity layers.

Unfortunately, that would require re-inventing the fundamental design of packet-based networks.

The interleave option will be overridden internally when necessary, as when mixing mono and stereo plugins in one track. Most of the time, it works fine. Other times, you get unexpected results. It's totally legit to mix 'n match mono and stereo effects; you just have to think it through while you're doing it. For example, you have a great guitar solo going on with a mono amp sim and mono interleave, and decide to throw in some ping-pong echo at the end - only to discover that it neither pings nor pongs until you change the track interleave to stereo. Even though Cakewalk does a heroic job of trying to make your Frankenstein FX chain work, sometimes it just can't. Whenever a vendor offers separate mono and stereo versions of their plugins, there's a good reason.

I think that's a good idea, Noel. This past year we've seen an enormous influx of new users, many of whom could be easily stumped by such problems. As long as it's not a silent workaround and the offer comes up in a yes/no messagebox. That way, users will have the option of either accepting the suggested fix or addressing it themselves. Some users are married to ASIO for one reason or another, and would prefer to troubleshoot the issue first. I'm normally not a fan of such potentially annoying verbosity, but it's not like this scenario is going to be an everyday occurrence.

I can barely afford two speakers, much less five of them. I did, however, do an experiment once with an ancient pair of Pioneer quadraphonic headphones. That was fun, but then I realized just how awful headphones sounded in the 60's.

You might try switching to WASAPI if you're currently using ASIO. Lately I've been doing a lot of fiddling with my audio interface trying to get Jamkazam to work. In the process, I'll often end up with the "no device" issue. For example, CW will work OK but WMP says there's no device, or YouTube videos and/or Netflix come up silent with no messages. That could be because I use WASAPI for CW, while Jamkazam insists on ASIO and won't run if it can't find an ASIO device. However, my experiences may be irrelevant to your situation. I have the onboard audio permanently disabled.

My preferred method is the one suggested by Alan above. Freeze the track, select it and CTL-SHIFT-drag it into another audio track. This has the added advantage of being able to copy just specific parts of the track. For example, you could drag a single cymbal crash or snare hit over, reverse it and nudge it to the left for a whoosh effect. I'll sometimes use that to implement a reverse-reverb effect at the start of a vocal phrase.

Well, I finally got Jamkazam working properly and tested it last night with a bass player and a guitarist. And a drum machine. Thank goodness for the drum machine. I was getting 2.9ms, but the guitarist was contending with such long latencies (~80ms) that the only way I could stay in time was to not listen to him. The bass player was off, too, but he had no technical excuse because he was the one hosting the drum machine. What has turned me off the whole thing, though, was the horrid audio quality. I was expecting something akin to streaming audio at 128 kb/s, but it was far worse than that. It was tinny and had a lot of chirpy aliasing going on. The experience was not pleasant, didn't feel natural, and I breathed a sigh of relief when the guitarist announced that he had to leave the session. Better than nothing? Um, I have a drum machine of my own. And a capable multi-track DAW. So no, for me it was not better than nothing. Oh, and apologies to Starise for the mis-attribution. In the future I will err on the side of statistical probability and just blame Craig by default.

Starise was joking, that ain't me. One reason I can be sure it isn't me is that I have yet to get Jamkazam functioning properly. It's 1.0 software. Pretty rough around the edges. Surprising, given that it's been around since 2014. Yesterday I decided to play around with routing in my interface, wanting to switch which outputs were being sent to Jamkazam. But when I attempted to change the output channels, instead of modifying the setting it added two more channels. And then complained that I could only have 2 - and gave no way to remove them. To add further insult, when I clicked CANCEL it complained again and refused to close the dialog. Then I tried re-running the setup wizard in hopes of getting everything back to defaults, but it told me I couldn't do that with an open session. But I couldn't close the session because the port-selection dialog that wouldn't close was covering up the main window. I was caught in a Mobius strip of bad programming.

In terms of S/PDIF, no. It's a digital transfer, so assuming no issues with cables or cable lengths, you simply get what you get. Same as a USB or an HDMI port. Assuming it's working correctly, neither clocking accuracy nor jitter should be an issue. Preamps are another thing. But if you don't use the analog inputs, the benefits of higher gain with lower noise won't interest you. I am a Focusrite user today but used a more-expensive MOTU for many years, and an entry-level Roland unit before that. The only complaint I have with the Focusrite is I sometimes have trouble getting enough gain on the mic inputs, and there's noticeable noise when I crank them up. Otherwise, I think the unit (Saffire Pro 40) was a good value.